


the storm lifts up the leaves

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Marauders' Era, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-29
Updated: 2009-05-22
Packaged: 2019-01-19 11:24:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12409413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: Black like an eye, bruised night brightens by morning, yellow then grey - a memory.  What the light was like.//A memory in three parts





	1. the light here leaves you lonely, fading

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

They had been friends once in second year. 

It lasted for two days, fourteen hours, and twenty-six minutes. 

And then, she had rounded the corner to find him breaking Severus Snape’s nose and they found, as children sometimes do, that it was necessary to part ways: Lily with her head held high and her jaw firmly clenched as she took Severus to the Hospital Wing and James with a bruise on his shin and a red mark on his cheek. 

Third year came and boys became increasingly ignorant and then fourth year when boys became arrogant.  After all, it is a truth often acknowledged that at fourteen years adulthood is almost a step away.  Almost. 

Lily grew up with convictions; James with a scoff and a laugh for such things.

So there was no reason why she would’ve thought of him as a challenge, no reason why he had unwittingly accepted it.  It was quite opposite from how others had perceived it, but this does not come as much of a surprise. 

And so – naturally it was a shock when he asked her to the second Hogsmeade visit planned in their fifth year.  He had asked in a quiet corner of the common room with a smile, a stutter, and a nervous scratch to the back of his neck.  She had answered with a quiet “no” and he had gone on his way. 

He did not ask her again until the end of that school year.  With that question and the incident that followed, he ruined any scrap of friendship they might have held on to as well as her friendship to a Severus Snape, an almost tragic demise that had been approaching for at least a year

And thus – sixth year enters with a heavy weight and a sigh. 

… 

The train rushes down the tracks, smoke and steam pouring past her window.  She can hear the wind whistling through the small crack in between the window and the wall of the compartment, the sound seeming to wind around her eardrum and ruffle her hair.   

She squints into the sun, its brightness only veiled by smoke and ash, and holds her hand up to the light.  

The cracks between her fingers seem to burn. 

It’s never occurred to her that skin takes light and traps it if it is just careful enough.  She closes her eyes to the light and, seeing the same burn there, thinks that she may have caught a glimpse of an actual spark.  But it’s only the sun peeking out to flash into her eyes through the window of the moving train. 

A girl yawns across from Lily and asks loudly, as if wanting to disturb the others, “What are you doing?”

“Catching the sun,” she says with a murmur and a yawn herself.  

…

And she’s standing there, right there.  

Right there.

In front of him.

And he hasn’t seen her, really seen her since the end of last year.  And he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him except that he’s short of breath and angry.  

Angry.  

An angry that makes his glasses slip down his nose and breathing really loud in his ears.  An angry that causes him to fall silent and not ever want to look at her ever, ever, ever again. 

When she stops on the stairs suddenly and he runs into her, he jumps back and them clumsily pushes past her and he knows that she didn’t even see him and, frankly, that makes him angry too. 

…

There is a violent thunderstorm on the first day of classes.  Green leaves, ripped too soon off their branches, ribbon, spiral up, up, up before rain tears them apart to shreds until they fall down, down, down.  It makes the air hot and sticky and the rain especially wet and even stone walls can’t keep out the thunder.  It’s all very terrifying and all very exhilarating. 

... 

Somewhere in between realizing that the Ravenclaw in front of her had put on too much perfume and deciding that she’d get arthritis because she popped her knuckles, it had started to rain.  It catches her attention in the pause Professor Binns takes to catch his breath after his particularly long discourse on the Giant Wars of 1011.  The wind makes a strange whispering noise and unnaturally causes the window to shake.  Mary nudges her, pointing out what she had already noticed and Emily looks wide eyed at the bizarre grin Sirius Black is giving James Potter from across the room. 

The window shakes again and flies open, sending papers and voices up in an almighty spiral.  The wind whips through the hair of the surrounding students in the way that summer-autumn wind does, slashing the coolness of a cold front across their faces, sending an odd sort of adrenaline rush through their blood.  

James Potter is the one to pull the window closed again, securing it with a charm.  Still grinning hugely, he looks at Lily.  And she looks back.  He is surprised, his cheeks pinker than usual from the rush of the wind, a now fading grin a vague illusion.  She tilts her head, and, giving what could be perceived as a peculiar look, covers her mouth with her hand as if to trap words or a smile, and looks away. 

She doesn’t see him smile for the rest of the day.  

…

He remembers when it started – 

One day in fourth year, she causes him to double take as they pass each other in the hall. 

He stops mid-step, very nearly loosing his balance, and his head juts out in an awkward position that immediately cramps.  He watches her walk down the length of the corridor and disappear around the corner.  Slowly, he turns back around, pushes his glasses up his nose, sticks his hands in his pockets, and carries on with a furrowed brow for the rest of the day. 

It wasn’t until later that he realized there was a sway in her hips and a strange quirk embedded into the corner of her mouth that hadn’t been there the day before. 

It was the end of him. 

…

There’s a crooked wind that blows in, hurling itself against trees and leaves.  There’s life in this wind, a top heavy, winged, deep life, a soul streaking through hairs and across faces. Branches jump and leaves shake, whispering their last words as they prepare for winter. Casualties fall every moment, red, orange, brown, yellow, comrades up in arms drift achingly to the ground, forever to rest in peace among their tragic, mushy piles. 

…

She’s standing at the window, half in the act of sitting down, one hand on the window sill and one on the desk.  She hears the door behind her open and close softly, she hears footsteps suddenly stop.  She thinks – _knows_ – that it isn’t the professor.  She looks quickly over her shoulder and sees James Potter.  She’s surprised, a little, and through the rays of sunlight, she stares.

And he fiddles with his glasses while he stares too, surprised just as much as she. 

And three seconds seem like an eternity. 

…

His shoes (feet?) are too big for his body, his arms too awkward.  His body too lanky, his nose too long, his face too thin.  His hair too neat, his mind too smart.  Too young, too old, too gentle, too dangerous, too much, too little, too loved, too hated. 

Too human. 

Too monstrous.

Remus Lupin has too much of everything.

His trainers were bought two sizes too big (he thought they looked cool like that) in hopes that he might actually grow into them some day.  It never happened (though an advantage was that he never had to buy new shoes again).  His shoes are comical, too wide at the top to let his pants fall comfortably down around them; instead, they are bunched too awkwardly at the top (Sirius Black makes fun of him for this, but he has learned not to mind).

He is smart (too smart, James Potter often says) and very good with Transfiguration (James and Sirius are better).

Too easy to talk to, too easy to make friends with, though too shy, Peter Pettigrew was his best friend in first year (Remus regrets that after the summer before second year, Peter came back quiet and subdued – he’s sure this played a part in their close friendship diminishing). 

He is too inspired when it is not the time to be inspired and, therefore, lacks the creativity potential that would have been too much for him had he ever reached it. 

Remus Lupin is too overwhelmed with life (but, often enough, he finds, too unimpressed). 

__________________________

Sirius Black laughs. 

It’s what he does. 

A strange sort of profession that requires a certain amount of cynicism.  His characterization summed up in the barking laughter that causes him to throw his head back and use all his shoulders. 

He never used to laugh like that.

He never used to laugh. 

It’s a sort of rebellion, he thinks one day.

Pretending to be happy.

___________________________

He knows he can only be described in so many words. 

He hates questions like, “What is one word that you would describe yourself with?”, “What is the one word that your friends would describe you with?”

Who cares? 

Even now, he most certainly doesn’t (and does) want to know what words he’d be described with.

He sometimes wants to read his eulogy (and sometimes he doesn’t).

And he wants to know what James, Sirius, and, especially, Remus will say about him if he dies.

When he dies. 

…

It is too rainy for a Tuesday afternoon.  Dark storm clouds press in around the windows, fighting in through the cracks and underneath the doors. Fingers of wind spindle up through the hall and around the ankles and wrists of students, tugging them, tugging them, to the cracks and to the doors, inviting them to take part in the spectacle that is too often ignored. 

But Lily Evans treks on to the library, pulling the sleeves of her robe down and pulling her socks up, moving far away from the cracks and from the doors so she can unhear the whispers of the spindling wind that push past her eardrums.

She takes a seat at one of the long tables in the center of the library.

It is her fourth year and she has unknowingly chosen a seat at one of the long tables in the library that is only a few chairs away from James Potter’s seat.  She does not know this until he walks back from the stacks with a pile of books in his arms.  He sets them down, looking at her slyly.

“That’s an awfully good seat you’ve chosen there, Evans.”

She looks up, surprised, and her shoulders slump just a little when she realizes what she’s just done to herself.  She hesitates before answering, making sure that she chooses just the right words.  Maybe she will be able to get out of this in an efficient, nice sort of way.

“Yes, I thought it looked nice enough.  And I thought that I wouldn’t be bothering anyone…and that I wouldn’t be bothered.  That’s why I chose it.”

“Those are good reasons,” he says, turning his mouth down as he considers her answer.  His hands are in his pockets and he bounces just a little on the balls of his feet.  “But you didn’t know that I was sitting, just there,” he says, cocking his head to the side to indicate his seat only a few feet away.

“Erm…no. No I didn’t.”

“Oh. Right then.”

She smiles unconvincingly and, pulling out a book and a piece of parchment, determinedly begins whatever assignment she had originally come to the library do to.  He looks at her a little worriedly and tries again, “Well, I was just thinking that you were awfully close.  You know how it is in the library – concentration and all that.  So, I was wondering if you could scoot down a few chairs.”

She frowns and looks to her right, the direction in which she would be “scooting.”  There is someone already sitting in the place that is now considered to be “a few chairs down.”

“I think we have plenty of room.  If I move down anymore – well,” she says, gesturing to the person to her left.  She’s trying very hard to be indifferent to the disaster he is creating. 

“Oh. Right. That _is_ a problem.  Well, you could always just…leave.  Scurry off to greener pastures.”

“I’m not sure that’s the right expres –”

“I really think it’s best.”

“I actually think I’ll just stay right here.  I think you can manage perfectly fine,” she says, turning away from him with an air of finality.

He shrugs a little and goes to his chair, opening a book and then closing it.  He turns to her and stares at her strangely before getting up to sit in the chair just next to her, “Go away, go away, go away, leave,” he chants at her in a whisper, trying to fight a smile.  She ignores him and continues to write.  “Evans,” he says and she looks up at him expectantly, “Go away.”  She doesn’t say anything, only rolls her eyes and turns back to her paper.  A few more minutes pass as he mutters his Go Aways at a very arrhythmic pace.  She finally begins to pack up her things and he says, “Good.  You’re leaving.  Now I can finally get some work done.”

She looks at him for a moment in disgust before speaking, “You know, I don’t understand you.  You give off all those stupid little speeches about ‘Why do I hate you?’ – which I don’t, by the way – ‘Why aren’t we friends?’ ‘Things change, _people_ change, Evans,’” she throws back at him, mockingly.  “Well, it’s because you do things like this.  Do you have any self awareness at all?  You act like an idiot constantly.  A very _mean_ idiot.”  She finishes packing up her bag and begins to leave.

He looks up at her sullenly and says, “Go away, _please_.”

She looks at him appallingly before saying, “My pleasure.”

He watches her walk away before returning to his seat, opening a book and then closing it.  He bites the inside of his cheek. 

He likes to think that he is a little bit in love with Lily Evans.  He knows he is probably wrong about this, never knowing truly what he is all about and thinks that he hardly ever has enough room in his body to begin with, let alone for any kind of romantic sort of love.  He is an enigma to himself and himself alone.  So he wishes that Evans didn’t seem to have him so well figured out. 

A strong gust of wind beats against the tall windows, breaking his train of thought and turning him back to the book in his hand. 

…

It would have come sooner or later, she thinks, as James helps her pick up her books that he haphazardly made her drop as he had haphazardly rushed into the common room just as she had haphazardly rushed out. 

The odd sort of confrontation that isn’t really a confrontation. 

The odd sort of confrontation that comes at the wrong time in exactly the wrong place and doesn’t even really happen, except…that it does.  

“I am so sorry.  I…you see, I – should have watched where I was going?  I mean…I am so, so sorry.  Mum always tells me that I’m in too much of a rush and that I walk the way I speak, without thinking, you know…and God, I am so sorry…Lily.”

She feels very foolish in this instant because the only thing she can think to say is a line from a poem that she memorized for her pretentious, literary mother for her forty-second birthday. 

(Did I love a dream? 

My doubt, night's ancient hoard, pursues its theme 

In branching labyrinths, which being still 

The veritable woods themselves, alas, reveal 

My triumph as the ideal fault of roses.) 

And so all she says is, “Your mum is right. You do talk without thinking.” 

She walks away with a blush (really, anyone should be quite envious of it), mentally slamming her head in a door, and leaves him scratching the back of his neck and nervously fixing his glasses the same way that he did when he first told her that he fancied her “quite a bit”.   

…

The willow stands just a few feet from the forest, far enough away that it is only noticeable to the one who wants to notice it.  

And when it’s a full moon, there is always a wind all its own that ruffles through the leaves and the moonlight washes over it longer than usual and baths it in an eerie glow, heavenly. 

The tree is un-earthly when the lower branches are limp and the higher dance.  It’s too contradictory of itself.  It can’t decide what to be, eventually causing its madness and causing its violence.  It’s reaching for a soul it will never hold. 

And when it’s a full moon and there is always a wind all its own that ruffles through the leaves and the moonlight washes over it longer that usual, it’s happy that three boys press the secret knot that paralyzes its secret life because it stops madness and rage and reaching and is still. And it can simply be. 

…

Remus Lupin was a strange sort of anomaly.  He had written her a note once in his fifth year.

He had slid it over to her along the table, making the swishing noise of paper against wood. It was folded clumsily, creases too sharp in one corner, one not sharp enough. Crumpled paper, brownish, a little dirty, torn hastily.  He hadn’t looked at her as he slid it over, kept writing his essay, but awkwardly, his arm stretched over to her as he tried to keep his balance.  He was smiling out of the corner of his mouth, his hair sticking up in the front just so that he looked just so…just exactly like a _boy_.  She was surprised and looked up at him, grinning, blushing a little.  She turned back towards the note, watched it as it sat, secret in its conspicuousness as her hands made a frame around it. 

He watched her out of the corner of his eye as she picked it up and unfolded it slowly, paper crackling as she smoothed the creases with her careful fingers.

_There was once a girl from Brighton_

_She liked to keep the light on_

_And one day she did,_

_When she was a kid_

_And the electricity bill was a sight…on._

 

She had let out a giggle before grabbing her quill and taking a few minutes to scribble:

_I know a boy who likes rhyme,_

_He also likes keep time,_

_But one day his friend_

_Had come to wits end,_

_And wished he’d be reduced to slime._

She flicked it over to him, her aim wildly off as it hit him on the thumb.  He hastily opened it, and, eyes scanning it quickly, turned to her and said, “Touché.” 

Amelia Bones laughed out loud, for no good reason, really, and decided that she really liked Remus Lupin. That she _really liked_ him. 

... 

Since first years seem to have not quite learned how to walk down a hallway, Lily encounters a crowded corridor.  Pushing through, she, of course, bumps into someone, spilling her books and knocking his bag.  Uttering a quick stream of apologies, she hurries to gather her books before standing up, straight into a Severus Snape.

“Oh.  I’m so sorry.  Sev.”

He has a look of quick surprise on his face and she realizes that he really had not idea who he bumped into, the poor thing.  Quick surprise changes to quick contempt and as he sweeps away with various pieces of parchment in hand, she remembers a quick word – 

_Mudblood_. 

…

It’s November now, and the skies are grey and trees are almost bare.  There’s a lost sort of light, accidentally shining on the wrong place, in the wrong time, on the wrong earth.  It’s fragile and will break as soon as the sun is gone, shattering into a thousand pieces, the shrapnel piercing trees and already dying grass.  

…

Sitting in the library, the right side of Lily’s face is becoming increasingly hot.  Sunlight streams from the windows and down onto her table and papers and chair.  And face.  And so she hardly notices when someone sits down next to her.  She is annoyed.

As if choreographed, Emily and Mary look up at the same time.  Emily breaks out into a smile; Mary firmly shuts her eyes (she has refused to ever see Sirius Black again.  She is a very literal person). Lily looks up briefly as well and sees Sirius Black sitting in the chair just next to her.  He grins at her before turning to talk to Emily.

Lily turns around again, back to her papers, and attempts to scoot her chair away a little, but, much to her chagrin, Hogwarts chairs are far too heavy for her to lift while she is sitting on them and she does not want to bring too much attention to herself.  It could result in something embarrassing.  And, after all, uncomfortable situations have been known to happen rather frequently and are to be avoided whenever is possible.  By now she is sure that she is getting sunburn on her ear. 

She glances up again (it’s too hard to concentrate.  Sirius and Emily are having a very loud conversation about the Gryffindor Quidditch team) and sees Remus Lupin with whom she immediately locks eyes.  He rolls his eyes, _This is a library, do they really have nothing better to do?_

She smiles, _No, I don’t think they do._

By now the conversation has ended.  Lily’s face is still hot, Emily is still grinning, and Mary still has her eyes shut. 

Sirius stands up, looks at Lily, rolls his eyes at Mary, and walks away with a long-striding gait with Remus only a few steps behind, his hands in his pockets and his head down. 

Lily stares pointedly at Emily who immediately loses her smile, “Don’t say anything, Lily.”

“Did I open my mouth?”

Now she is more irritated than ever (her face is still burning, Sirius Black is still adored) and when she looks back to Mary who still has her eyes closed, she snaps, “Mary, you can open them now.  He’s gone.”

… 

He’s often thought that if she lay there long enough, in the grass, staring at the sky the way he sometimes remembers her doing, that she’d be overtaken by the earth around her.  He hair, transformed into lost feathers; her skin, the expansive sky; her eyes, the leaves; her feet, the roots (but not in a bad way, he suddenly thinks.  He really does love roots.  Really.  He does).  

And when he thinks these things, he feels very silly because he’s not sure if he’s supposed to think like that.  And he feels stupid because he knows that she’d hate something so sentimental. 

And he feels ashamed because he knows that James would be horrified but gracious. 

And he feels ashamed because he knows that Sirius would roll his eyes and laugh. 

And he feels ashamed because Remus, his friend, would sympathize and then tell him gently:

Out of all girls, the one he shouldn’t try for is Lily Evans.

Their names together have a ring: Peter and Lily. 

But he knows that it’s not so nice as James and Lily. 

Potter simply sounds better than Pettigrew.  His smiles stop.  It storms constantly behind his eyes.  He begins to hate his name. 

He slips and he falls. 

Jealousy. 

…        

“All I’m saying is they’ve been perfectly horrible to him for his whole time at Hogwarts.  They _provoked_ him half of the time.  You never did anything to stop them,” Lily says as she stands over her boiling cauldron.  She contemplates it for a moment before adding more boomslang skin.  

“I never knew until after the fact…most of the time.”

Lily glares at him but is betrayed by her smile, “You are horrible, Remus Lupin.”

“It’s pointless to even bring it up now, though, isn’t it?  Snape’s been absolutely horrible to you.”

“Well…yes, but there’re plenty of people that have done horrible things but it doesn’t make them horrible people.”

“What a hypocrite you are.”

“What?  Why?”

“Have you kept in mind what…or who…exactly we’re talking about?”

“Oh.  Well…you know what I mean, don’t you?  All you four have done is ostracize him for the past five years.  Almost six.” 

Sirius Black turns lazily towards her, and, catching her eye, says, “Define ostracize, Evans.”

She opens her mouth to respond, but finds her brain completely, completely empty of any sort of coherent thought except, “I don’t have any response to that”. It pounds syllables across her eyes, mocking her. She blushes and turns away. Of course she knows what the word means, but Sirius Black makes her feel like a fraud – foolish  and naïve – and she can’t think when someone talks to her like that, and that makes her incredibly angry.

He smirks at her and turns away, a simple gesture that carries too much meaning. 

She turns back to Remus, who’s looking at her wide-eyed, her cheeks still red (but that could just be from the steam coming off her cauldron). 

“Maybe you’re right,” is all she mumbles. 

…

She used to muss his hair when he’d read and not listen to a word she said. 

(First Year). 

 They sat close and she knew that “people talked” as Mary would say, rolling her eyes. 

(Second Year). 

She loved the long sloping of his nose, the way that it was a more exaggerated version of hers, the way he had parchment always sticking out over the top of his school bags.

(Third Year). 

 His posture had been thrown to the dogs because he was always craning down.  He almost always looked her in the eye.  She was much shorter than him. 

(Fourth Year).

She called him Sev.

He asked her why.

“Because it fits you,” she would say off-handedly.  She would never speak the words, “Because Severus is cold and green and silver and sharp.  It’s a name that is jagged.  It might make me bleed.” 

_Because it fits you._

And it did fit him when he was fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten.  When his feet and hands, like a puppy were too big for his body.  When he was awkward and had a slow smile.  When he had long eyelashes and thick eyebrows.  When his dark eyes were filled with warmth.  It fit him.

At fifteen, his name was Sev.

_Mudblood_.

At sixteen, his name was Severus,

_Because Severus is cold and green and silver and sharp.  It’s a name that is jagged.  It might make me bleed._

…

The library is raining.  The sky pours drops down the tall windows, casting small dots of shadows on the books and shelves and carpets.  The candles are low, a subtle reminder that the library will be closing soon, leaving the corners dark and foreboding, housing strange monsters that exit only in imagination.  Lily wonders if she might be anxious if she didn’t feel that she might just fall asleep if Emily didn’t keep quizzing her on certain potion ingredients.  Emily looks down at her watch thoughtfully as Lily yawns out an answer and says, “Do you suppose Peter ought to be here soon?  He said he’d be here fifteen minutes ago?”

“He’ll be here.  Maybe’ll he’ll keep us from falling asleep.”

“Mmm, I don’t think so.”

“Yeah,” Lily says with a quiet laugh, “But he’s nice enough.”

“All right.  How many times do you stir Felix Felicis counterclockwise?”

“Er…none.  You stir it clockwise 50 times every seven days.”

“Yeah…how’s Mary doing?”

“Eh, I don’t know.  Better.  I went up after dinner and Madam Pomfrey had just given her a Pepperup Potion.  She’ll be fine.  It’s just another one of her colds.”

“How long does Veritaserum have to boil?” 

“Thirty days.”

Quiet footsteps pad against the carpet and Peter is at the table.

“Sorry I’m late…there were…things.”

“Yes… _things_ ,” Lily says, looking at Emily.

“Yeah?”

“It’s good that you’re finally here is all she means,” Emily says, shuffling through her notes.

He seats himself and pulls out some notes and immediately begins questioning Emily about the different properties of advanced potion ingredients. 

Lily is lost in the monotony and stares down at her papers, reading a line expounding on the characteristics of monkshood before giving up and hoping that, by some miracle, sitting in front of the information will cause some sort of osmosis to occur; hoping that maybe she will just remember the information automatically.

She lays her head on her arm, concentrating on the sound of her heartbeat.  She can hear it faintly through arm hair and skin.  Her brain goes all wonky when she’s falling asleep.  She imagines strange voices singing soft songs and knows, somehow, that she’s consciously dreaming.  She’s brought back by her name, “Lily?”

She blinks her eyes and brushes some hair out of her mouth.

“Oh sorry, were you asleep?” Emily asks sardonically.

“No, no, no, no, no, simply concentrating deeply on information so that I might pass a test tomorrow.”

“Hm, well, Peter here asked you a question.”

“Oh, sorry,” she says, glancing over at him. He’s staring at her.

“It’s fine. Just…do you have the recipe for the Polyjuice Potion on you? We were wondering about the side effects.” 

“Yeah, let me find it for you…,” she lifts her head and begins rifling through her papers.

“And Potter here wants to know if he can speak to Peter for a minute,” Emily says again, motioning to a shadow standing beside her.

Lily squints up at him through the dim light, her eyes dry from her dreams and blinks, “You want to speak to Peter?”

“No need to sound so bamboozled,” he says absurdly, “I just need to talk to him.”

“Nothing out the ordinary, really,” says Peter, grinning at her.

She looks over at him and he smiles wider. 

“Well, do you think you can spare him?”

“Yes, I think I’ll be able to stand it,” she sounds angry and it surprises her.

“Only for a minute,” he says with a small smile. 

As Peter gets up and they walk away, James looks over his shoulder a little and cocks his head back like he’s trying to hear a quiet noise and laughs at what he knows is Lily’s disbelievingly stare.

“Honestly, he completely interrupts us.” 

“He just wanted to talk to Peter for a minute s’all.”

"Yeah, I’m sure that’s it…I’m so tired.”

“Really? Chocolate Frog?  Peter brought them.”

“Yeah, sure…what are the side effects of the Polyjuice Potion?  I don’t even know…where are those notes?”

“I think I have them.”

“Oh.”

She’s silent as Emily looks.  There’s thunder now.  It’s several minutes before both Peter and James come back in.  She hears their voices before she sees them, “…So I asked McGonagall about it and she said it was fine and that we should start on Monday.  She gave me some papers to go over.  I’ll give them to you later.”

“Yeah, of course.”

Lily sits up straight and pushes her hair from her face before flipping through her book to make it look like she’s concentrating. 

“Back to studying again?”

She tries to look indifferent as she glances up at him, “Yes. Have you studied yet?”

“A bit,” he says as he looks of to the side and scratches his neck.

“That’s good.”

“Yeah,” he says as he swings his book bad around to his front and begins to look through it. “Look, I have your…your notes.”

“My notes?”

He looks at her and nods, “Yeah, those Charms notes that you let me borrow a few days ago.” She looks at him blankly.  “That first year tripped and hit his head on the stairs so you might not remember?  Here they are.  Yeah, anyway, you wrote the hand movement for…something…wrong.  I can’t remember, but you’ll see it.  I just thought you should know.”

He hands her the notes.  She flips through them to find the correction he made.

"Wait, right there,” he says.  He puts a hand on her shoulder and leans down, pointing to his handwriting.  “Yeah, for the Apneo charm.  It’s a flick to the left and then counterclockwise. The other way and you’d suffocate whoever it was.”  He brushes her hand as he pulls back. “So…yeah.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“Yeah, of course.”

She looks at him quickly before turning away again, “I’ll see you.”

“Oh.  Y-yeah.  I’ll see you,” He straightens up, “and I’ll see you Pete.  And Emily.”

“Yeah, bye Potter,” she says, staring at Lily, her eyebrows raised.

“See you, James.”

There’s silence in which lightning rips through the sky and across hundreds of books.

Lily clears her throat then and looking unaffectedly at Peter, says, “I’m sorry.  What did you say the side effects of the Polyjuice Potion were?”

…

“Hi Lily…Evans.”

She looks up from the book in her lap to see James Potter standing in front of her nervously. 

It is the winter of their fifth year.

“Hello.”

He looks at her determinedly, his hands in his pockets.  He bounces on the balls of his feet.  “Did you need something?”

“No! No…I just…actually, yeah – would you…look over my chart for astronomy?  I’m bollocks at it.”

She looks at him strangely, looking at his forehead as if this will tell her whether or not he is lying.  It seems to tell her that he’s not. “Oh.  It always _seems_ like you know what you’re doing.”

“Yes – well…,” he says, looking at her a little helplessly.  It’s pitiful. 

“All right.  Bring it here.”

He hands it to her and she looks over it, making corrections with her quill.  She’s concentrated, her lips pursed and her eyebrows knit together. “Here,” she says after a minute and hands the chart back to him. “There’re only a few corrections.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah, sure.”

He continues to stand there.

“Was there anything else?” she asks.

“You’re looki – you’re being very nice this year, Evans.”

“Well…I suppose you’re giving me reason to be nice.”

“Yeah?  I’m glad.  I like it when we’re nice…to each other.”

“Oh,” she says, her cheeks turning the slightest bit pink.  He feels his stomach do something funny and the beating of his heart feels stronger.

“Well,” he says with a small little laugh.  He pushes up his glasses and takes a deep breath, taking a seat next to her.  He sits on the edge of the chair and looks at her intently.  “You wouldn’t like to – to go…with me, to, ah…”

She looks at him wide eyed.

“Hogsmeade?” he eventually manages to choke out.

She hesitates, almost seems to make a move towards him.  He looks at her expectantly.

“No.  Thank you, but…no.  Thank you.”

He stands up instantly, and, looking a little embarrassed, says, “Oh.  Yeah.  Right.  You’re – welcome…shit, sorry.”

He smooths his hair absently and smiles at her awkwardly. 

He walks away.  

She watches him worriedly and tries very hard to be indifferent to the disaster he is creating. 

She sees him, not as himself, but as an idea, some antagonistic villain that can be defeated on paper.  Only – he isn’t a villain (though he _is_ antagonistic) and he isn’t on paper.  He is real.  But though she sees him everyday, he is some ugly but ethereal ideal that she doesn’t quite understand.

She sits idly for a few moments, staring at the pages of her book in her lap.

If she’s quiet enough, she can hear her heart beat.  And it feels strange to her because she thinks that even if it stopped beating right at that moment…or this one…she wouldn’t die.  And it feels strange to her because she thinks that death must mean more than just her heart stopping and her organs failing.

She resolves to be nicer for the rest of the year. 

_________________________________________________________________________

Title, summary, chapter title from 'Book of Hours' by Kevin Young

Lily's poem: 'The Afternoon of a Faun' by Stéphane Mallarmé  [](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_Mallarm%C3%A9)


	2. above even the birds winging heavenward

He had once been considered to be “quite a catch.” Everyone knew it. He knew it. Girls had sighed over him in his third year, daydreamed in his fourth, asked him with new feminine boldness in his fifth for a date. James laughingly claimed that it was innate, in his blood, being a Black and all. 

Molly Huckabuh had been the first girl to receive a yes, unbeknownst to her because of a sudden fit of rebellion. She’d smiled winningly, all the muscles tightening in her face. Sirius thought that in that moment she’d looked a little pretty. 

And he liked her a little. She didn’t mind kissing him which he supposed was nice and she didn’t drape herself all over him whenever he was around her. 

But he found her in the common room one night snogging a seventh year. She broke up with him right in front of her bloke too which was more than a little embarrassing with the bastard staring at him with a very smug look on his face. 

And that was the end of that. 

… 

The snow falls in a quiet, tragic way and almost, almost melts when it touches surface upon surface, snowflake upon snowflake. This is the way the snow falls when it is the first one and it’s a fragile, physical thing.

It’s an incomplete feeling, a tear across the sky, a perfectly clandestine thought hidden among chaos. 

It’s a silhouette of something out of order, a spirit nearly broken.

Quietly, the world holds its breath, for though it is a fragile, physical thing, it holds an elegant head and power over fate. 

…

She stands at the door, shivering, looking menacingly at the fresh snow as she clutches her books in her arms.  There is something strange in the air that makes her cough whenever she breathes too deeply or shiver violently whenever she relaxes into herself too much.  It’s not too far to the greenhouses, but it’s far enough.

He sees her standing there as he heads to lunch and feels that it is strange that he should see her now, in such natural, unordinary circumstances, during the day when, for once, he hadn’t tried to run into her.  And he feels strange that he thinks it feels strange.  He takes a shaky breath and half wishes that she’d just go out the door already because, really, it is winter after all and sweaters are only mild protection against cold. 

“You know, it is winter, after all and sweaters are only mild protection against cold,” he says as he walks up from behind her. She turns quietly to look at him as he comes to stand beside her, his hands in his pockets as he stares out at the grounds.

“Yes, I know,” she says, before going quiet again.  A few moments later, “Oh, sorry, I guess you were trying to hint at something.  I have to be going anyway…class starts soon, I think.”

He tries to gather courage as a sudden thought has just taken hold of him.  He takes another shaky breath before turning to look at her, “Don’t you think we should be friends?”

“Excuse me?” and now there’s nothing quiet in the way that she looks at him.  She has surprise and what looks like to be a residual, tired sort of anger shading her eyes.

“I’m entirely serious,” he says as he sighs and looks out again across the grounds.

“We’ve tried once before,” she says after being quiet again for a few agonizingly silent moments.

He pauses before saying, “Yes, we have.”

And maybe he’s miraculously found exactly the right moment or maybe the weather has some sort of strange hold on her, but she says, “But I suppose we’re not twelve and I suppose that certain, critical circumstances have changed since then.”

“It seems to have worked out that way,” he says.  He’s still not looking at her.

“Yes, I suppose it has,” she says with a small laugh.  She tilts her head and leans around to him to look her in the eye, “Hey.”

He looks at her, “Yeah?”

“Aren’t you cold?  And hungry, I guess.  You were on your way to lunch, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.  And you were contemplating going on your way to Herbology, weren’t you?”

“Yeah.  Contemplating, exactly.”

“Well, then I’ll be going to go to lunch now.  By the bye, I think I’ve made you late,” he says, looking at his wristwatch, “And – please close the door, you’re really causing quite a big draft.”

She disbelievingly watches him walk away, before laughing in a slightly bemused way.  She looks down at her watch, realizes that she is in fact quite late, and hurries through the snow, letting the door swing slowly closed behind her. 

…

“I think we’ve got new pillows,” says Sirius, poking them as if he were touching a dead animal.  Remus gives him a withering look. 

“Why? They seem the same to me.”

They’ve got that bleached smell to them, like a new feather pillow. They smell starched.”

“You can’t starch a pillow.”

“Have you ever tried? I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“Them?”

“Honestly Lupin, the house elves. Here, give it a smell.”

“I will not smell your pillow.”

“Do your own then.” 

Remus does so and then says, “It smells like a pillow.”

Sirius walks over to sniff it, “It smells just like mine. You don’t think it smells any different? What kind of starchy house-elved pillows do you sleep on at night? I swear…they’re starched.”

“I think the better question is: what kind of pillows do _you_ normally sleep on?”

“What are you talking about? That’s a horrible question,” Sirius says as he turns back to rifling through his trunk. “Hey, do you know where James and Pete went off to?”

“They’ve got that project for McGonagall they’re working on. Probably in the library.”

“Hmph. Oh.”

The dormitory door creaks a little and both boys look over to see Peter Pettigrew hurry in. “Padfoot, you haven’t happened to see the – what are you doing?” he asks when he sees the contents of Sirius’s trunk spread out around him. 

“Maybe I’m cleaning. I don’t really know,” Sirius replies, impossibly nonchalant and forlorn all at once. He sighs and flops onto his bed, “What did you need?”

“James just wants those potion notes back that he leant you last month. He wanted me to emphasize that it was a month ago so that you’d give them back to him.”

“Tell him I don’t know where they are. Moony, let him borrow yours.”

“No. You all will just end up losing them and then none of us will have any potions notes from last month.”

“Well Pete, you could just go ask some of the girls. Or Slughorn…but he doesn’t really like you, does he? Pity.”

Peter stares at Sirius for a moment as if trying to contain some sort of emotion while trying to figure a solution to his problem, “Fine. I’ll just go ask Emily…or Lily.”

“Evans won’t give them to you.”

“She likes me.”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t like Prongs.”

“Well apparently she does. They’ve agreed to be friends,” Remus says from his bed.

Sirius props himself up on his elbows and stares at him before snorting in unbelief, “I don’t believe you.”

“Ok.”

There are several moments of silence, Sirius still laying on his bed, chewing his lip, thinking, Remus sitting cross-legged, reading a book, Peter shuffling through some school papers that he pulled out of his bag.

“I don’t believe you,” Sirius says again.

Remus puts his book down, “Am I supposed to ask why?”

“Yes…but I mean…I just can’t believe you. I am a Remus Lupin atheist.”

“If you have to know, he told me. It happened before lunch or something. I don’t really know. Why don’t you just ask him? Obviously it wasn’t some huge thing…”

“But I don’t want to ask him.”

“Ok.”

“Ha! I found them!” Peter says suddenly before running out of the room, clutching a pile of papers in his hands.

“Because I don’t really think I care, anyway,” says Sirius indifferently, sliding off the end of his bed to sit in the middle of his mess.

Remus sighs but complies, “I know.”

Sirius looks at him again before looking forward, staring at nothing in particular. Remus turns a page of his book before flopping back on his bed to lie down. 

They are silent.

… 

His mother had said something to him once that he always wanted what he couldn’t have.  

This thought occurs to him as he watches Lily Evans take notes in Charms. She’s pretty, he _supposes_ …maybe it’s only that he’s only ever wanted what James couldn’t have. Or something. No, that’s ridiculous. 

Well, it doesn’t matter anyhow. He wouldn’t actually do half the things that he always has the impulse to do. Pettigrews know when to be sensible.

… 

She runs into him as she tries to balance herself and her bursting bag through the portrait hole. He stops and looks down at her, dead faced and blinking. 

“Oh. Hi,” she says, straining to look up at him, her book bag alternatively attempting to make her a permanent hunchback. 

He breaks out into a grin at her, “Having trouble?”

She gives him a weak smile in return and tries to heft her slipping bag up over her shoulder, “’M not bad. And…erm…you?”

“Oh, I’m goo – well…I meant well. Proper grammar and all that… _tons_ of work though,” he says as he shrugs lightheartedly and gives a little sigh. 

She looks blankly at him, “Oh, yes, your workload must be so overwhelming.” And at last, her bag gracefully wins its battle as it slides off her shoulder and falls to the ground with an echoing thunk. “Oops,” she says, looking down at the crumpled bag, books and papers beginning to spill out. 

He looks down at it too, head tilting a little as if he is contemplating a great problem, “Well…Evans, it looks like you’ve got a mess on your hands. Good luck with that.” He smiles reassuringly, pats her on the shoulder, and continues on his way. 

“Oh, you’re so helpful.”

He turns back to her, smiling, “Thank you.”

…

“Hello there Miss Bones.”

She looks up to see him smiling down at her, “Hello Remus.  You don’t happen to know what Flitwick’s assignment was, do you?”

“I do.  Why don’t _you_ know?  Skipping class?”

“No.  I –”

“Oh, you were sick.  Have you been sick?” he asks, a mockingly concerned face looking at her earnestly.  He places his hand to her forehead.  “Have much of a fever?”

“You’re being stupid.  I just didn’t write it down.  May I have it now?”

He grins at her sloppily and pulls out a piece of parchment with page numbers written on it, “There.  In all its glory.  Fifteen pages to read by tomorrow.” 

She hastily copies it down before looking up at him inquiringly, “I thought you said you weren’t coming today.”

“Oh – erm…change of plans?”

“Hm.” 

“Hm,” he repeats back at her and sits down in the chair next to her.  

“Oh how mysterious you are trying to be.  It’s pathetic, really.  Out with it.”

“I only just remembered about that Defense test.”

“What were you doing that you could forget about that?” she asks, frowning.  He shrugs.  “Are you ok?”

“Yeah.  I’m fine.  Just…my – my mum’s sick again. ‘S’all,” he says, looking at her straight in the eye. 

“I’m so sorry.  She’ll get better soon though.  It’ll be fine.  What does she have again?”

“Pneumonia,” he says without pause and without emotion.

“Oh.  Well, if you have to go and see her again, I hope she’ll be doing better.”

“I’ll – tell her you said that.”

She looks up at him in surprise and blushes uncertainly, “Oh.  All right.  Yes.  I’d like that very much.”

…

There seems to be a mix of footwork and tempos with this – whatever “this” is.  A set of strange, unspoken cues for when it is time to say the right word or smile a certain way.  It’s a multiple personality disorder, knowing someone like Lily. 

For instance, on an undated morning at breakfast, the Great Hall:   


He tries to nonchalantly and with a sort of masculine grace, flop into the seat next to her.

“Morning.”

He smiles a little awkwardly, attempting a sad half smile and ruffles the hair on the back of his head, hiding his face in his arm. 

She looks at him sullenly and rolls her eyes before turning back to her textbook.

There is tension there that he must have missed, written into the invisible subtext that no one can seem to read, and it is waiting, anxious to show itself, biding its time, cleaning its fingernails. It’s in there, in stilted conversations and morose sighs. 

He makes a note of this and straightens up, clanks silverware, puts food within arm’s reach onto his plate, and in the midst of reaching over several piles of food, smashes his hand into a pitcher of pumpkin juice, knocking it over.  It dribbles slowly (thankfully, nearly empty) along the table and under plates and cups, and most importantly, it seems, along the bottom of Lily’s book.  He stops mid-chew, a piece of bacon still half in and half out of his mouth and he stares at her, knows that whatever he says or looks or feels like next will be crucial.  It’s a little tiring, like trying to figure out which wire to clip in time to stop the bomb.  

But she doesn’t miss a beat, she’s rehearsed this dance several times by now, or, she acts like she has.  “ _Scourgify,_ ” she mutters quickly and the juice disappears, though it still pleasantly stains the pages of her book with a light tinge of orange.   


He grins at her for a moment before she notices and turns to him saying, “You’ve got bacon in your teeth.  Yeah, just there…no, the other tooth.”

…

The two girls walk down the hallway quickly, their heels pounding out a rhythm against the stone, the hem of their robes flying along the ground. 

“I just can’t find it anywhere…,” says Mary, rummaging through her bag as she walks.  She trips a little, almost losing her balance, but laughs a little.

“Are you ok?” Lily asks grinning, helping her along.

“Oh shut up.” 

“Your wit truly dazzles me.”

“Yes, and you know it.”

“Does that even work in context? It didn’t make much sense…”

“Well, you often make no sense.”

“Touché?  I don’t even know how to reply to such a _scathing_ comment,” Lily says laughing. 

“Because you’re often so brilliant yourself, yeah?  I cannot find that paper anywhere.  Have you looked in the dorm?”

“A bit, meaning that I glanced over at the stack of books in the corner and I didn’t see anything that looked like it there.  I’ll look again later.”

“The defense essay’s due on Friday, right?”

“Yes and it’s absolutely ridiculous.  Ridiculous.  Have you even started the reading for Binns yet?”

“Erm…I read the first page.  I don’t even know why he’s talking about the witch trials again.  Didn’t we do that in…what was it?  Third year?  It’s completely irrelevant informa – Oh! Sorry, didn’t see you there.”

They’re met with the sight of Sirius Black brushing past them quickly and a few brief words as he turns around to face them, “An empty hallway and you still manage to be clumsy. Didn’t expect that from even you, MacDonald.” 

“Lily, please inform him that I meant what I said in third year.  I shall never speak to him again,” she says calmly, and continues walking, her back now turned to him.

“Well, Mary, Mary, quite contrary.  How does your garden grow?" he asks, smiling at her suggestively before walking away quickly.  She doesn’t look back at him.

“Wonderful display of intelligence there.  First rate,” Lily says, running a little to catch up with her.

“You know, one time my dad hit the only car in an empty parking lot when he was trying to teach himself how to drive after seeing some…movie.  My clumsiness is probably inherent.”

“Yeah probably.  It could just be you, you know.”

“ _No_ , never.  My parents probably just ruined me when I learned how to walk, made me lean sideways or something.”

Lily laughs again, “Oh, that must be it.”

They are silent and the hallway’s noise presses down on them, making the air heavy.  Their walking is slower and the corners darker.  And something feels lost.  

… 

They lay around on the grass, their bodies sprawled into a primordial cross, the crown of their heads facing in on each other.  Sirius has a fag hanging lightly to the left side of his mouth and James has his hands over his eyes.  Remus sleeps, forever in a dream, and Peter stares blankly at the sky.

“Why are we here again Black?” James mutters.

“We all need some fresh air,” Sirius says, his jaw clenched a little before he blows smoke into the air.  He starts coughing violently.  “Does anyone know how to make a proper smoke ring?  Whenever I try I always end up breathing in what I’m trying breathing out,” he asks, clearing his throat.

“You have to curl your tongue, like this,” Peter says, turning his head towards Sirius so that his neck cranks and sticks his tongue out in a strange shape. 

“Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing…huh,” Sirius says.  The boys fall silent before he pipes up again, “So what’s up with you and Evans?”

Even Remus has popped one eye open now, but he looks, squinting, at the cloudy sky.

“So what’s up with you and Martha Stebbins?” James throws back at him, as he sits up now, his shoulders slumped. 

“That’s disgusting, mate.  It really is.”

“Why the hell are we here again Black?” James says now, turning around to look at Sirius Black face on. 

“Stop being superfluous Prongs, honestly.”

“I’m actually not sure that super –,” Remus begins to say.

“My hands are freezing.  It’s freezing.  I’m going inside,” James says, cutting Remus off as he stands up.  He makes his way towards the doors.

“What a pillock…well, I suppose we’d all better go in.”

Sirius takes a moment to stretch and Remus tries to warm his hands as he looks after James walking away. 

“Maybe if you had an actual conversation with James about her, you wouldn’t have this problem.”

“He could have bloody well told me, couldn’t he ’ave?”

“ _I_ told you.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? Ugh – my joints are all stiff. It’s freezing out here.”

The three boys stand up, Peter shrugs and shivers for just a moment before saying, “Sirius, lend me a smoke.”

Sirius holds out a cigarette grudgingly and Peter lights it, inhaling just barely before blowing out a tiny smoke ring.  He grins.

“Forget Prongs – _you_ are the pillock.”

“What?” Peter asks still smiling.

“You’re a bastard, that’s what,” Sirius says as he shoots a glare at Peter.

“It’s bloody freezing out here, let’s go inside,” Peter says, ignoring Sirius as he starts to trudge back to the school.

Sirius shrugs and Remus blows out a wisp of air.

They follow. 


	3. The storm lifts up the leaves.  Why not sing.

He watches her from across the Common Room, scribbling a Charms essay as quickly as she can. 

Her legs are crossed, her foot tapping, her hair falling down around her shoulders and into her eyes, the ends tousled and reminiscent of curls once upon a time.  Her back is hunched over her paper, her eyes too close to the edge, an old habit, he thinks, when she’s completely taken by words.  She pauses in between scratching out words with her quill, hand flying up to her earring, twisting it absentmindedly, chewing the inside of her cheek, concentrating, trying to find the emotion that will help her say exactly what she means.  She pushes the same strand of hair out of her eyes every few seconds until she becomes fed up and throws it, almost violently, back to where she thinks it belongs, before tapping her foot to a different rhythm, before straightening her skirt, before wrapping her cloak tightly around her. 

She runs her fingers along the feather of the quill, so slowly, slowly, slowly…so deliberately, intentionally, purposefully.

She is so ordinary, it’s surreal. 

…

They sit across from each other at the Gryffindor table, eating breakfast.  Every five minutes she shakes the paper loudly when the top half flops over into the Pumpkin juice pitcher. And every five minutes, he looks up quickly, expecting to see some sort of commotion, but realizes that it is only Lily and her paper and resumes staring at his plate of eggs. 

“You make a good point,” he says, to his plate of eggs, of course.   


Lily looks up and says, “What?”

“You make a good point,” he repeats.  He is talking to her, now, and not his eggs.  “And I agree that folding the paper in half would make it easier to read.”

She gives him a look that tells him that she would like to be glaring and says, “Cranky?”

“Emotions are all based on opinion and attitude.  Who’s to say if I’m in bad mood or not?” he flops his head down on his arms.  His hair is dangerously close to his eggs. 

“That is possibly the stupidest thing I have ever heard you say.”

“But, yes, I am tired.”

“Is that not also subjective?”

“Maybe.”

“I feel like I have just wasted sixty seconds of my life.”

“How captivating we both are,” he says, but it is slightly muffled now.  His face is back in the crook of his arm. 

Sunlight streams through the tall windows and onto James’s head.  It’s interesting, the way his hair takes light and hides it if it is just careful enough.  She closes her eyes and lifts her face to the light and, seeing a happy, hazy, sort of beautiful golden, thinks that she may have caught a glimpse of an actual spark.  But it’s only the sun leaping out to flash into her eyes as James moves his head to peek out at her. 

“Yes, I suppose we really are.”

They hold each other’s gaze. 

And three seconds seems like an eternity. 

…

She picks absently at the top of her socks, a thread tightly wound around her finger as she tugs at it, attempting to rip it out. 

“Hey,” he breathes out, leaning over the back of the couch she sits on. “Alright?”

“Hm.”

She looks at him from behind her itchy sweater and her too big jeans that slip down her waist. 

He smiles in a frown, straightens up and backs away, fiddling with the knot of his tie.

“It’s – erm – it’s snowing again.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. It is.”

He’s cold and unsure, sliding his finger over the flat tip of the eraser that he left in his coat pocket.  His hands and feet are cold.  And his nose.  He cups it in his hands, trying to warm it.

“Are you – ok?”

“My nose gets really cold during the winter.”

“Oh,” she says, smiling happily at him.  “Is it awfully cold outside?”

“A bit.”

“ _A bit_.  What an understatement,” she says as she closes the open book in her lap with a thud.

“No it’s not.  Not this time,” he says earnestly, taking two steps towards the couch again. 

“Not this time, you say.  That instills so much confidence in me.” She stands up and lifts her chin at him.  He raises his eyebrows, challenging her.  “What?” she asks.  He leans against an armchair behind him and considers her.  Her head cocks to the side and she stares at his forehead. “Do you – ah – have something to say?”

“Not – not in particular, you know.  I’m just going to – go to dinner now.”

She gives him a strange look before picking up her book and heading towards her dormitory, looking back and saying, “I might be down in a little while. I mean…don’t wait up or anything.  I’ll just be –” she cuts herself off before nodding once and walking up the stairs. 

He looks after her, looking down only once she disappears within the spiral of the stairs. He breathes out loudly.  Shutting his eyes momentarily, he runs a hand through his hair and straightens his glasses and his tie.  He bites his thumbnail as he walks out of the common room and only just barely breaks the skin when his teeth miss. 

…

She hums to herself lightly, the only song that her mother ever sang to her in her soft, gritty voice.  She sits on her bed, twirling a broken quill between her fingers, one that had been residing on her bedside table for the past few months, and the snow hits, not very lightly, on the window.  It’s quiet in the room, a quiet that she feels she has lacked for the past few years of her life.  She finds this depressing and oddly sentimental (this word pops up all of a sudden into her head as she thinks about the quiet and is quite sure that it isn’t the proper word to use in this situation; at the same time, she’s quite sure that it is proper).  She feels like she is in that in-between stage; that part of life where she is on the brink of something new, but she hasn’t figured it out yet.  Or – or that her perspective is about to change.  Maybe she’s heading into darkness, maybe she’s journeying towards some sort of enlightenment. 

It makes her impatient to wait.  Even more so as she waits for the next thing that day to happen.  She’s bored sitting cross-legged on her bed with her lower back pressed painfully into her pillow.  She knows that she lacks the motivation and a little bit of ambition and that scares her. 

…

It’s only 11:00 on a Saturday morning when she looks for him in the common room and finds him sprawled along a couch in a position that will surely keep him from turning his neck independently from the rest of his body.  She prematurely takes time to wince on his behalf. 

There is a book heaped across his legs and a quill dangling from his hand, ink slowly dripping onto the rug.  His mouth is open and his glasses are close to breaking from the pressure of the frames against the side of the sofa.  He wheezes a little.  Sleeping is like eating, she decides: you don’t ever really want someone watching you do it. 

She smiles at him as if he can see her and walks out, suddenly feeling a little more than perplexed.

It isn’t until later that she realizes there was something handsome about his nose and nice about his waist that hadn’t been there the day before. 

Bewildered is a good way to describe it. 

…

There is a strange end to winter this year.  Snow melts, leaving branches amidst puddles by themselves, forced to endure loneliness until spring or even another snow.  The weather is sporadic, dead and alive, beating and stopping.  It is warm and then cold, sun and then snow.  It is indecisive, the earth not sure yet what of what exactly it means to be, not sure yet of what exactly it desires.  It is a planned confusion bleeding out to the edges of everything like spilled ink.  It stains and leaves its mark until it finally fades away. 

…

Amelia decides one day that Remus Lupin is handsome.  In his own way of doing everything in his own way.  

She thinks he is handsome even when he doesn’t come on Wednesday nights to study and even when he doesn’t seem to really see anyone.  It doesn’t happen very often but it happens enough.  

He seems a little broken somewhere inside of himself…some sort of rod or cord is holding him up that makes him who he is but is cracked and about to splinter.  

She somehow sees that even in his own way of doing everything in his own way, she plays only a little part in his life. 

… 

“So what’s up with you and Evans?” Sirius tries for a second time.  Only now, he sits on the edge of his bed while James is trying something new with The Map.  James gives him a sort of strange exasperated look and doesn’t answer.  “Look…,” he says but can’t think of anything else to say.

“Nothing.”

“Something’s happened.”

“Nothing.  Nothing’s out of the ordinary.  You – you’re going to jinx it or something.”

Sirius lets out a bark of laughter, “That’s what this is.  I’ll ‘jinx’ it?  What are you, a five year old girl?”

“Oh shut up would you?  It’s just, you know…,” he says, but can’t think of anything else to say. 

“Yeah.  Sure,” Sirius nods his head a little.  “You’re absolutely nuts though, you know. She’s…”

“Yeah, I know.”  He lets out a quick puff of air that could almost be a laugh and turns back to The Map.

… 

“I don’t suppose you have the Charms homework?”

“Well in fact I do.”

“Could I…compare answers?”

“No because I know this is just a ploy to copy off of me and I know because I’ve done the same thing myself. To you, even.”

“Lily.”

“No.”

“Fine.”

“Fine,” she says, sending him a strange look from across the table. He grins at her and leans back in his chair. “Do you have an extra copy of the potion ingredients from yesterday?”

“Well. You know, I _remember_ seeing them _somewhere_. They’ll show up eventually I’m sure. Once I’m done with the Charms assignment.”

“You’re incorrigible.”

“I know. I think it suits me.”

“You might be right. You’re one of those people whose looks reflect their…soul. Your hair is a perfect example – it’s positively unruly and so are you.”

“That’s…insightful.”

She gives him a wry sort of smile and continues to scribble at an essay. 

She gives him a wry sort of smile that makes his body feel restless like he needs to get up and do something and prove something and matter to someone and it hardly matters who. 

But he stays seated.

“James,” she says, looking at him inquiringly.

“Er – yeah?”

She pauses for a moment, obviously thinking about _something_ before blurting out, “Never mind. I…forgot.” She turns and looks through her bag for _something_ , blushing only a little.    

… 

Spring comes suddenly.  It rains constantly but there is finally color somewhere in the world.  There’s an odd sort of transition between winter and spring, bittersweet and short, in retrospect.  But there is finally color and there is finally life somewhere in the world. 

…

He sits in a chair in the common room, the ceiling high and the walls ornate with paintings and tapestries and several clocks all showing the wrong time.  One leg is flung up over the arm of the chair, the other resting on the floor, his shoes making a light dent in the rug.  She rests next to the shoe and the leg, sitting on the floor, his knee reaching to the top of her head, his voice drifting down to her as he goes over the things that only seem to concern the two students and their coincidental friendship.  Playing with his shoelaces, she loosens them as she twirls them around her finger absentmindedly, and tells him that she thinks his idea involving the Giant Squid and Filibuster’s Fireworks is absolutely ridiculous and will more than likely get Sirius killed and will more than likely end with Remus getting three of his toes amputated.  He says something, ruffling through a stack of parchment in his hand, a rare pencil behind his ear, and she laughs, looking up at him, seeing his body all out of proportion as he smiles too without looking at her. 

They live in a muffled world, sound proof and secret, floundering smiles and static laughter, vision faltering just a little.  It’s a strange friendship, treated as though it’s fully developed when it has not even been truly formed.  It’s premature, living and breathing simply on a machine, mechanics creating life where it should not be naturally found.  It’s all they can do; really, all anyone can do after eight years of development has brought evil to its peak. 

“You are absolutely mad.”

“Am I?” 

She pauses and looks at him for a moment, contemplating him, studying him openly for the first time in her life (the first time?).  He’s looking at her intently, waiting patiently for an answer, the noise that he always seems to carry with him, hidden somewhere in the tips of his fingers or in the roots of his hair is quiet, words incomprehensible, mouth quirked, already knowing a reply, glasses digging into the bridge of his nose, hair pushed back from his forehead as he rests his head in his hand.  He’s full of motion even when he’s still, a kinetic energy, threatening to burst forth. 

“Yes, you are quite mad. Absolutely,” she repeats. 

“Well then, as you are such a good judge of character, I will simply have to accept your view of my madness,” he says with an air of feigned pompousness. 

“That is wise,” she says, nodding her head gravely.  “Countless stories are there of those unaware of their own hidden madness until, on the fateful day that it is revealed to them, their madness is increased tenfold, resulting in their early deaths.  Tragic is the story of Gerald Bobineau, a tale too horrifying to tell.”

“And I’m the one who’s mad?”

“I think redundancy is the first sign of madness, you know.”

“Really? Well then I must have gone mad years ago.”

“Hmm?  Such a pity, really.  Well, it shall be noted that I will be at your funeral, dressed in my best robes and silent, gravely mourning the day when your madness was first revealed to yourself, gravely mourning the fact that it was I that told you,” she says again in a faux-somber tone.  “‘What a poor, dear soul,’ they will say to me, to whom I will reply, ‘Yes, dead in the prime of his youth.  Bless his heart, his cold, no-longer-beating, dead heart.’  I will wipe away a well placed tear and turn away, unable to face the tragedies of this world, longing to see the sunshine yet again.”

“The metaphorical sunshine?”

“No, the actual sunshine.  I have decided that it will be raining on the day of your funeral.  It only adds to the effect.”

“You are ridiculous, Evans.”

“Yes, it doesn’t suit me does it?” she says, her hand stopping with his shoelaces that now lie limp and untied.  She turns around, placing one hand on his knee and the other on the arm of the chair as she pushes herself up from the floor.  He flinches a little.  “Sorry,” she says, smoothing her shirt down and kicking one heel of her shoe against the other. 

He “hmphs” at her uncharacteristically before standing up himself, tucking the parchment under his arm and checking the pencil behind his ear.  They look at each other intently again. He’s taller than her by three inches exactly. 

He’s come to find that there’s more ridiculousness in how much he’s grown while the world has gotten smaller, more ridiculousness in the pettiness of attraction, more ridiculousness in adulthood than childhood than could ever be contained in Lily Evans. 

He thinks that ridiculous suits her just fine. 

…

Peter remembers when it started –  

He had drawn into himself, putting up some wall that slowly caused a strange form of isolation.  He had only been twelve.  He had become simply an observer of humanity and realized too late that he had forgotten how to interact with anyone outside of himself normally.  Or, at least it didn’t feel normal.  

He had begun a process of picking apart language and dialogue and friendships, trying to piece together some makeshift form of relationships.  And it didn’t work.  Or, at least it didn’t seem to work very well.  

He tries to act like he’s _supposed_ to act.  But he’s not even really sure what that is anymore.

Peter finds himself floundering around for any sense of reality, trying to grasp truth and feeling like it has failed him – or that he has failed it.  He constantly feels like he is on the precipice of something big, this dull sort of wrenching restlessness that writhes in some dark corner of his body.   

It was the end of him. 

… 

She had asked him a single question.  Well, it was more of a suggestion, really.  But, in the end, it would always be thought of as a question – a question that hung thoughtlessly between them.  At least…it seemed like that to her. 

She could read people well.  His eyes had become wide, the way they always did when he was confronted with something he did not expect and did not want to think about.  He had taken a step back and looked away from her.  For a moment.  For a second.  But a second was all it took.  

And he was gracious.  And she couldn’t have expected anything less, now that she thinks about it. 

It would have been easy – the scheduled Hogsmeade visit was only a day away.  There would have been no more unnecessary awkward moments than need be.  But he said no.  Remus Lupin did not look her in the eye; he looked at the floor, as if he were telling a particularly bad lie or as if he were ashamed of himself.  Well, perhaps he should have been.  

But he said no and she had smiled and gone to turn away when he had said, “Amelia…I’m really sorry.  I just – can’t.” 

She supposed that’s how she might have responded to someone asking her the same question, too.  

Well, if it had been anyone but Remus Lupin. 

…

Sometimes she’ll see him look.  Not stare.  Look.  The two words are entirely different, meanings entirely different.  They’re different.  She knows that she’ll convince herself of this eventually if she repeats it over and over.  Because…well, she likes him.

Oh God, not like that.  

They have a nice _friendship_.

(Not like that.  So don’t even think it.)

But when she sees him glance (that’s all it is.  He’s glancing in her general direction and she always just catches him at just the wrong time.) she gets a little worried.  

But she has something like fondness or admiration or respect for him.  That kind of feeling when she generally just likes being around someone.  She knows a lot of people like that and is just glad to have another addition.  It’s simple.  That’s all it is.  

It’s so simple.  She doesn’t know why she didn’t think of that before.  

It’s always good to give a name to something – it’s easier to figure out.  

She’s glad that she finally gave it a name – respect.  Because that’s all it is.  They’re equals, peers, and she has respect for him (though she doesn’t know when _that_ ever happened.  It’s hard to have respect for someone who she knows ate a spoonful of blue goo that Sirius somehow managed to conjure up with his wand in second year).

But respect, admiration.  It’s all the same in the end.  The two words are practically synonyms. 

It’s so simple.  She doesn’t know why she didn’t think of if before.  

…

The end creeps up.  For it is the end when the days get warmer and the sun starts to be more of a nuisance than a godsend.  The wind begins to slow and it is winter all over again, things almost dead and things not happening as quickly as one would like.  Bright mornings turn into lethargic afternoons full of sticky sweat and socks that cling to many an ankle.

The end is near. 

…

And it’s over before he knows it.  Summer comes too soon and he knows that he only has one year left.  One year.  And he doesn’t feel nearly as old as he thinks he should feel.  He’s only seventeen, for god’s sake.  Seventeen, that – that’s nothing.  In terms of history, seventeen years is a second.  It’s nothing. 

And his sixth year is over.  He’ll board the train and sleep and eat and play some kind of ridiculous game that they decide to make the rules for as they go along. 

She’ll sit in a different compartment which is really ok.  It’s fine.  It’s nothing less than he expected. 

And in a few hours that normally seems to be much, much longer, he’ll get off the train and he’ll see his parents and he’ll wave good-bye to Remus and Peter and pat Sirius on the shoulder really hard on purpose to try to make it hurt.  And she’ll wave to him and smile as she walks through the barrier and he’ll nod his head and smile too, raising a hand in acknowledgement. 

And God – he’s only seventeen. 

It’s too soon.  For everything, really.  He’s still just a kid.  He feels younger than ever, so young, like it’s only the first time he’s coming home after being away at school instead of the sixth time.  

And the thing is, he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next year.  To him, there was always a sense of security about the next year and even three years after that, but now there’s nothing.  There’s some kind of blank spot where his life at nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, thirty, forty, fifty should be.  

And God – it scares the crap out of him.  

But, oh, the day is beautiful and it’s warm and it smells just like it should.  And he tries to force his…immaturity issues, he guesses he would call it, out the window to try to enjoy the last days of his…childhood.  

The word seems so nice now that he’s trying not to run away from it.  But he feels that recognizing the niceness of the word will put him even farther away from it than he originally intended. 

Oh God – he’s only seventeen. 

…

The summer is long and hot.  It drawls out its days and has crickets play their sad melodies just like it should, just like it does every year.  The houses are too hot inside and too hot outside and the only consolation is that there’s indoor plumbing and cold water available only feet from the fan that whirs and pounds through ear drums a comforting sort of sound.    


There’s rain occasionally, dripping slowly through the humid air.  The summer is tired and sleepy and pale, oh so pale.  Everything has a golden grey static look about it.  Everything.  

There are no clouds in the sky and the blue is washed out like a shirt that sits in the sun for too long.  

An owl collapses into the upper window of a house in Surrey and a girl rushes over to open the window, practically knocking it into the room.  She puts a small container of water in front of it and hurries to untie something white and bulky from around its leg.  

She opens it carefully, reads it, then laughs.

She laughs, feeds the owl something quickly, and sends it back on its way.  

She laughs and runs out of the room, the letter clutched in her hand, yelling down the stairs, “Mum, I’m Head Girl!”

“That’s wonderful.  Why are you laughing, darling?”

“Oh, I’m happy, I suppose.”

Her mother smiles in approval and skims the letter that is held out to her in her daughter’s outstretched arm. 

She doesn’t read the part that says, “It is expected that you meet with the Head Boy, Mr. James Potter, on September 1 in the prefect’s carriage on the Hogwarts Express to begin your duties as Head Girl.”

She knows that her daughter is pleasantly surprised, but is wrong about the reason why. 

…

It’s smiling.  That’s all it is on September 1.  Nervous grins and small laughter, pursed lips in agreement with a friend, booming, wide, happy, anxious.  But smiling.  It is the first year for some and the last for others.  Or just in between for the majority.  But it means one year older and finally and, oh, how great it is to see you again.  

And there it is – the train is already steaming and bags are already packed safely away and the goodbyes and hellos have already been said.  The beginning is beginning to be over and those who realize this begin to embrace the end. 

…

He wiggles his toes and looks down at his shoes to see if the canvas on top moves at all.  He’s a little nervous.  His parents had told him to do a good job and Sirius had laughed and Remus had given him a look that said, “Don’t screw this up,” although James isn’t really sure what “this” exactly pertains to.  Besides, maybe it was only a trick of the light. 

He stands in the front compartment and is early, too early.  But – he didn’t want to be late. 

Then, the doorknob wiggles a little and then the door is sliding open and then Lily stands there and is grinning at him and assuring him that this year’s going to be great. 

And he’s grateful for her smiles and reassurances because he couldn’t feel worse about his place in the situation.  But he supposes that’s what he gets for having two troublemakers and a werewolf for friends. 

…

Summer fades into the dawn of fall, the light clear and the grass green and the sky blue.  There’s a sort of soft hush and a wind that carves stories of the places it has been into skin and hair, expecting to be welcomed back for a new season.  

It is the time for a new sort of dream, a sort of hope that what hangs on the horizon will not come crashing down too fast or too hard and that, perhaps, it will be over sooner than expected.

And in the quiet whisperings of blades of grass and rustling of leaves, solace is born and hope springs eternal.  

…

Time seems to slip out of her grasp.  The hours tick by and the days whir.  Mr. Eliot seems to have gotten it wrong, she thinks.  _There will be time_ , he says.  But there is no time.  There is not enough time.  

Time seemed slow when she was waiting for it to pass.  Now her life has arrived, the precipice that she felt she was approaching has already been breached.  There was so much time and now she’s running out.  Running out of time.  

Her stomach drops at this thought and the quill in her hand slackens a little, the ‘n’ she was forming so carefully now shapeless.  She looks up quickly at the board from which she was copying notes, saddened, musters up a little smile enough for the boy who is asking her now if she’s got an extra jar of ink.  The boy who – James.  

“James,” she says, a little puzzled.

“What?”

“N-never mind.  You ran out of ink?”

“Spilled it, just now.  Didn’t you see?”

“Oh.  No.”

“Hm,” he says, shrugging and turning back.  She watches him uncork the bottle; dip his quill in, so carefully.  He brushes his hair from his forehead and rubs his ear while he sets the pen to the paper and begins where he left off.  He’s only a few words in when he glances to his side and sees her, watching him.  “Did you – ah – need something?”

“Not anything I can think of.”

“Why’re you staring at me then, Evans?  Charmed suddenly by my sexy looks?” he tries his best to look debonair.  

“Oh yes,” she drawls out.  “After six long years, it’s hit me, how handsome you are,” she touches her hand to her heart dramatically.  “I’m positively swooning.” She smiles glowingly at him and he draws back an inch.  She thinks he might be blushing and she feels a little pleased.  

“I’m so sorry for deluding myself then.  But I thought I caught something amorous in your glance,” he says, raising his eyebrows suggestively and leaning slightly into her. 

She raises an eyebrow, “Oh really?”

“Oh yes.  And perhaps all this time, _you’ve_ been deluding _yourself_ instead of the other way around.”

“Well then, perhaps you’re right.”

“Of course I am,” he says decidedly. 

“Of course you are,” she says in the same manner, turning back to her notes as he turns back to his.  

They sit in silence for a few moments, their quills scratching out the words to a spell or a potion or a history.  They sit in almost complete silence until James stops writing, looks at Lily suddenly and says, “Wait.  What?”

…

It’s never hit her right smack dab in the middle of the brain like she thinks it should have.  It’s always a gradual thing, like…like learning how to drive a car or ride a bike or read or write or run.  It’s something you have to learn: fascination…infatuation…

But now, today when an unusually warm October Sunday paves pathways for students to the sky, she sees him smile, his shoulders slumped, his trousers rolled up, naked feet limp in the lake water, laughing, positively laughing while Remus exaggerates something with his hands and she can tell that Sirius is imitating ridiculous voices and Peter makes faces of the characters in their story.  His sleeves are rolled up and his tie is loose.  His shoes lay discarded off to the side.  His hair is ridiculous in the unexpected heat. 

And she feels like she has a concussion.  Attack.  Aneurism.  Hemorrhage.  Heat stroke.  She’s never felt this horrible even when she actually got Dragon Pox in her first year.  She’s scared.  And she knows that it’s not a second plague.  It’s a horrible, wicked thing, realization. 

It really _is_ warm today. 

She stands up to go inside.  Her skirt blows in the wind a little and she’s suddenly aware of her rumpled shirt and thin knee socks that have been pulled too much and are very loose and falling around her ankles, and her curling hair that she didn’t brush very carefully when she got up this morning.  She’s suddenly aware that the faces of four boys have suddenly become serious.  Remus Lupin looks down, running a hand through his hair and then flattening it, an odd mannerism.  Peter Pettigrew looks up, glares into the sun.  Sirius Black looks straight ahead, back straight, solemn face, his hair ruffled a little by wind on the water.  James Potter looks behind him.  At her.  Looking at him. 

“It really _is_ warm today,” she mutters halfheartedly at Emily who’s sitting on her other side, fanning herself with her hand, silent and contemplative. 

“Oh, you’re going inside? Do you want me to—?” Her question hangs there and Lily quickly shakes her head. 

“It’s alright. I’d like to be alone anyhow.”

All she can think of is taking off this ridiculous sweater and laying her face against the cool stone of her dormitory’s interior. 

Emily nods once and resumes fanning herself ineffectively. 

Lily nods once, “Right. I’ll be off now.”

“Ok, Lily…oh!” 

She spins around quickly, feeling like she wants some reason to stay, “Yeah?”

“Sorry, just…if you see Mary, tell her to find me.  I need to talk to her.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” and determined to actually walk away now, she makes her way across the grounds and back into the castle. 

Inside, she trails her hand lightly against the walls, feeling, absorbing the coolness.  Even her hands are warm and sweaty.  Footsteps echo behind her.

She reaches the doors of the Great Hall before deciding to look around, hearing the step, scuff, step, scuff of shoes behind her.  She hasn’t walked confidently this time. Or assuredly.  She walks slow, head down, fingers trailing lightly against the stone walls the entire time.  The footsteps behind her have matched her rhythm.  She knows they’re for her.  She stops, leaning heavily on the wall for support, bracing herself for what is about to come.  The footsteps stop just behind her. 

She turns around and smiles brightly, “Hi James.”

He looks at her warily, wistfully, “Hi.”

_Time is flying_. 

“Did you – did you talk to McGonagall about the changes in the Prefect schedule?”

“Yeah.  Listen – Lily.  I need to –”

“No.  Right, yeah,” she says, cutting him off.  She wonders what he would have said. “You know, I – I’m slow about these things.”  Her face already has such a deep blush that her cheeks feel like white heat.  Her stomach feels empty and hollow and flip-floppy all over the place.  Anticipation.

“Yes, I know,” he says, smiling down at her.  

“About, well – you and…”

He hums in agreement, his eyes bright behind his glasses.

She can’t seem to look him in the eye.  She takes a deep breath that rattles through her.  His arms are limp by his sides as he simply looks at her.  She sees his chest rise and fall with every breath. 

“Here…you have—er, there…,” she picks a piece of lint off of his shirt.  He looks at her seriously, she can feel it.  She would very much like him to make some kind of joke.  The tension makes her feel sick. 

“Oh.”

“Yes…w-well…,” she stutters.  

They’re silent before he says tentatively, “I was just – erm – wondering…,” he stops to clear his throat and doesn’t continue.

She brushes a strand of hair from her eyes and looks up at him.  His collar is rumpled, his glasses crooked across his nose, his hair even more of a catastrophe than before.  

This is very strange to her, whatever _this_ is.  She feels like a different person, like she is standing in front of a different person.  Perhaps he’s not who she thought he was.  But he offers her a small smile and she knows she’s wrong about that.  

She reaches up to fix his glasses, straighten his collar.  His smile widens.  “Yes.”  She moves her hand around to ruffle his hair in the back.  “Yes, of course I will.”

He touches her neck softly, briefly, pushing her hair back from her face.  She is clumsy, blind, her heart is trembling, her breath is tripping.  His hand is cold and it feels wonderful.

“That – that’s good,” he says, his voice sounding a little odd.

She grins at him and sighs, “Yes.  It is good.  Finally.”

The End 


End file.
